Open Lecture: „Design is not Anymore an Accident“ by Alexandra Midal

Design historian, curator and professor Alexandra Midal will give an open lecture, „Design is not anymore an Accident“, on Tuesday, 17 September, at 16:00 in room A501.

Midal’s lecture will be based on her book „Design by Accident: For a New History of Design“ (Sternberg Press, 2019).

Alexandra Midal writes that design history was written by accident. In her lecture, she draws attention to the forgotten history of design and raises the possibility of a 100% and all-pervasive new historiography that reformulates a design discipline.

The Design Open Lecture series 2024 is part of Sandra Nuut and Ruth-Helene Melioranski‘s Design Issues course. It is public and open to all; however, the seminar following the lecture will be held for the course students.

Alexandra Midal is a professor at the University of Art and Design HEAD-Genève and Head of the Department of Critical Thinking at Ensci-Les Ateliers, Paris. Art and design historian, she combines practice and theory-based research as an artist-curator, theoretician and film essayist. Her research explores the blind spots and grey areas of design history, as evident in her two latest books, The Murder Factory (Sternberg Press, 2023) and Design by Accident: For a New History of Design (Sternberg Press, 2019). She studied literature, architecture and art history at Princeton University (NJ) and in Paris (Paris-Sorbonne). She has curated a number of international exhibitions on visual culture, design, film, and politics. She is the guest curator of the next Biennale Bio28, Ljubljana, Slovenia, entitled Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower?